


At Death’s Door

by lnhammer



Category: Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came - Robert Browning, Original Work
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Desert Setting, Desert, Gen, Poetry, Quests, Sestina, narrative poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:01:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28695105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lnhammer/pseuds/lnhammer
Summary: Within the waste, dawn was diluted lightnot yet tinged with colors other than shadesof black. Soon molten sun would stream highabove him, washing the bare world sere and palewith the heat of desiccation, but for now,small mercies, it was cool enough to walkOr, what happens when “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” is retold as a desert southwest AU.
Kudos: 1





	At Death’s Door

Within the waste, dawn was diluted light  
not yet tinged with colors other than shades  
of black. Soon molten sun would stream high  
above him, washing the bare world sere and pale  
with the heat of desiccation, but for now,  
small mercies, it was cool enough to walk

and bright enough to see where others had walked  
before him—sunset drained away the light  
to a dark unlike any he’d known till now,  
no moon nor star, nothing to splash a shade.  
He had been glad to rest, though. Taut and pale,  
he stood, hiked his battered pack up high

on his shoulder, and continued on to the height  
of the next slow rolling hill at a walk.  
By the time he reached the ridge, the sky had paled  
enough he could see the next had the same light  
slope, the same thorn scrub, same lack of shade  
as everywhere since the forest, and only now,

after countless stones and dry arroyos, now  
he felt despair. After days of dearth in high  
plains, after the Dark Wood with its angry shades,  
what here drained all purpose from his vain walk?  
He couldn’t tell. He stared at the endless light,  
at this uncrossable wasteland called Death’s Pale

until he saw them: four buildings of pale  
adobe in the wash below, visible now  
that he knew where to look within the light  
landscape. He hadn’t expected this—a high  
tower perhaps, with walls on which guards walked  
to keep apart the living and dead shades.

Sun poured in his face, forcing him to shade  
his eyes with a gaunt hand. Below, his pale  
wife waited, the lodestone of his walk,  
his be-all end, his life. It was time now  
to do what he had once set out with high  
purpose to do but seemed, in this alien light,

a shade of wish: fetch her. But how? Well, now  
he must. Before the pale sun surged high  
he walked to Death’s Hall under its flowing light.

**Author's Note:**

> First appeared in _Ideomancer_ June 2009. Written in part as a demonstration of how sestinas can be a good form for narrative poetry—for the exact-right size story, anyway.


End file.
